My Pet Ram is pleased to present The Gleaners, the culmination of recent works by Christopher Daharsh and Earth Ængel. Please join us for the reception on Friday, March 29 from 6-9pm.

The two-person show features paintings both artists have deemed “cerebral” in their bodily activation, as well as sculptures demanding a more somatic interaction. The Gleaners features a range of both artists' embodiment and disembodiment of abandoned objects. The confluence of image and sculptures allows for a spectrum of soldered, painted, fused, and patinated works. Viewers will be hard-pressed to find canvasses to project their sentiments: a gift for the curious who observe willingly, not willfully. 

At one side of The Gleaners, Ængel presents a blue gem work evocative of refinement and piety, only to appear more mortal and complex upon further examination when a dollar-store pineapple water light fixture is revealed behind the curtain of glass and darkened metal - neutralizing the initial impression of a blue, rarified object. And at another end, a work by Daharsh presents an amalgamation of hardened shells — of both the snail and pistachio variety — paired with driftwood and an assembly of screws. But again, with further scrutiny, the sum is reconsidered when the piece is divulged as a cast - rubbery, singular, democratizing. 

The duality of such pieces conveys the artists’ mastery and intrigue with transfiguration. Accrued objects — the pineapple light, the shells — are gleaned and then embodied. With Daharsh, his work at times begins with a photograph of objects strewn, collected, formed - sometimes natural objects: such as a dam of flood detritus containing moss, plastic, and neon tags which he transfigures into a painting. The canvas, autonomous camouflage in appearance, was surely crafted during a time when Daharsh thought often of Agnés Varda, the filmmaker of the show’s namesake, The Gleaners and I. As with many paintings included by Daharsh, the picture appears as a net, with blocks and segments of colors. An impulse might determine this net as a frozen image of Daharsh’s gleanings, but this would be untrue as the piece impresses a sensation that the artist is beyond the borders of the canvases, holding the ropey net in the periphery in an action of constant directive agency where Daharsh provides suspense, focus, and assurance. 

The Gleaners features works on adaptation and accrual. With Ængel, what may be the silvery abode of a canary begs a question: aren’t we all in a cage? But the piece itself answers back in its very soldered patchwork fashion: the cage can break, but it can adapt, we can adapt! And nearby, the statements vocalized by Daharsh’s work are shrills and crunches heard in nocturne if not corpuscular scenes in parks, valleys riddled with industry smoke stacks -- all the summation of his own internal gleaning, or as both artists call it more fondly, accrual. And yet a stillness can be found in Daharsh’s work as well where multi-colored, textured casts are on one hand a product, and on the other, an initial inquisition into the assumption of what you are viewing.

Gleaners is a unique glimpse into the findings of Daharash and Ængel: their effective portrayal of transfiguration, and the variety of mediums they offer to display the input and output of once ignored remnants.

The Gleaners will be on view beginning Friday, March 29 through April 28, 2024. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday -Sunday from 12-6pm and by appointment. For more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.

Earth Ængel (they/ them) is a NB-trans artist that creates from their own gender fluid experience, navigating fantastical queer ecology through the dysphoria of hetero-centric late capitalism. Earth does not attempt to shame and scold these man-made values into submission, but ingests it. Laundering its consumption and laying by its deathbed- grieving, consoling the outcome- its funeral, and resurrects it into the archive of predetermined aesthetics, bringing it to the queer afterlife. As aesthetics and material use are examined in their roots of empirical value, Earth Ængel uses heat related practices to melt it all down. Earth uses glass, metal, solder, found objects and rosin based bioplastics as tools to express the disillusionment of the binary, and writing as the primary guide to start each artwork or series. 

Earth is a recent MFA graduate of Goldsmiths University in London. They completed their undergraduate BFA at Parsons School of Design. They have received awards from The Arts Council of England, Goldsmith University, and the NYC Parks Department to develop their work.  They have exhibited works in New York, London, Mexico City, Chicago, and Cyprus.  They live and work in Brooklyn, NY with their partner Rob Rose, where they have a separate art practice as an art duo, called earthr. 

Christopher Daharsh (B. 1990, Omaha, Nebraska) received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2012. His practice functions as a visual filter to his pedestrian and nomadic experiences in natural and built environments.  He is searching for a level of empathy with his environment through crowd sourced mark making and the slow hand of geological time. Painterly and sculptural composites come into being in the studio tethered to the scaffolding of various forms of pictorial and assemblage traditions, using observations and objects from his excursions in the field, creating a larger, mutated whole.

Christopher has attended a number of residencies, including two yearlong residencies from the Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, Missouri), Art Farm (Marquette, Nebraska), the Factatory (Lyon, France) and will be attending the Hayama Artist Residency in Hayama, Japan in June 2024.  Christopher’s current curatorial practice is reflected in a group show he organized at Field of Play (Brooklyn) & at Below Grand (NYC), where he’s currently a curatorial member. Recently Christopher has shown work at Haw Contemporary (Kansas City), the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas), Mother (Beacon, NY), Capsule Bikini (Lyon, France), Les Limbes (St. Etienne, France), Field of Play (Brooklyn), Deanna Evans (NYC), New Collectors (NYC), Underdonk (Brooklyn) and Outlet Projects (NYC). He has upcoming shows at My Pet Ram (NYC) and Koki Arts (Tokyo). Christopher currently lives and works in Brooklyn.